Au+Sommet!

=Going Once!= Amy Rauen: amyrauen@hotmail.com



Prototype Downloads
[|Game board top left.doc] [|Game board top right.doc] [|Game board bottom left.doc] [|Game board bottom right.doc] [|Impressionism Deck.doc] [|Surrealism Deck.doc] [|Going Once! Deck.doc] [|Answer and Clue Sheet.doc] [|Genre Labels.doc]

Instructional Objective
Going Once! supports the first part of standard 3.2 from California's Advanced Visual Arts content standards for grades 9-12: Identify contemporary artists worldwide who have achieved regional, national, or international recognition and discuss ways in which their work reflects, plays a role in, and influences present-day culture. In this game, players will apply their knowledge of artists of various genres.

Learners & Context of Use
Going Once! is designed for high school art history students. No special accomodations are needed to play the game, except time. Going Once! would have decks of cards from numerous art genres, making it playable many times over. Prior to the game, students would have had exposure to at least some of the artists featured in the game, and after the game, their knowledge of artists and their artworks will hopefully have grown!

Competing Products
The game that is most similar to Going Once! is [|The Fine Art Board Game], in which players move a game token through an art museum, collect pieces of art, and answer trivia questions. Going Once! is similar to The Fine Art Board Game in that players move a game token through an art museum, answer questions about artwork, and collect pieces of art, but it is different in that students "auction" the pieces of art they collected to try and earn the most money.

**Object of the Game**
The object of Going Once! is to be the player with the most money at the end of the game.

Content Analysis
Going Once! Content Analysis

Game Materials
1. Board 2. 50 Impressionism cards 3. 50 Surreallism cards 4. 50 Abstract Art cards 5. 50 Photography cards 6. 30 Pop Art cards 7. 50 Modern Art cards 8. 50 Scultupre cards 3. Genre labels 4. Player tokens 5. Deck of Going Once! cards 6. 3 six-sided die 7. Copy of the rules 8. Answer and Clue sheet

Time Required
Approximately 45 minutes to one hour.

The Rules
Going Once! is a game for 2-4 players.

__Object__ The object of the game is to earn the most money by auctioning works of art.

__Set Up__ 1. Set out the game board. Decide how many museum rooms will be played (1-4). Two rooms are recommended for two players; 3-4 rooms are recommended for 3-4 players. 2. Each player should choose a game token and place it in the purple starting square in the middle of the board. 3. Choose the genres to be played. The number of genres chosen should match the number of rooms you plan to play. Place one genre label in the middle of each museum room. (Note: Genres chosen do not affect game play.) 4. Shuffle the decks of art cards for each genre chosen. Turn each deck face-down and count out 6 "Admirer" cards, 6 "Buff" cards, and 4 "Connoisseur" cards from each deck. 5. Place the 16 cards from each deck face-down on the white rectangles in the museum room that corresponds to the genre of the cards. For example, if you are playing with the Impressionism cards, place the 16 cards from the Impressionism deck face-down in the Impressionism room, with one card on each white rectangle. 6. Place the Going Once! deck face-down to one side of the board. 7. Each player rolls one die. The player who rolls the highest number goes first, with play continuing to his left.

__Play__ 1. The first player rolls the dice and moves his token that many spaces, attempting to land on an art card. Each art card represents one space. Museum rooms can be entered and exited through the blue doors, which also each count as one space. Between rooms, each gold square represents one space. 2. When a player's token lands on an art card, that card is turned face-up, and the player must give the last name of the artist who created the artwork shown on the card. 3. Each art card has a code on it that matches a code on the Answer and Clue sheet, such as I-2, which stands for Impressionism 2. Use the answer code sheet to check the player's answer. 4. If the player gives the correct artist, he collects that art card and chooses a card from the top of the Going Once! deck. 5. If the player gives an incorrect name, the art card is removed from play and placed in a discard pile. 6. When all art cards have been removed from the board, players begin the auction.
 * Collecting Art**

1. If the Going Once! card a player chooses is a Play Now card, the player should immediately follow the instructions on the card. If the card is a Use Later card, the player should keep the card, for future use. Use Later cards can only be played at the beginning of a player's turn, before he rolls the dice, except for Use Later cards that say Get a Clue. 2. Players can use Get a Clue cards during a turn to get a clue about the artist whose name he must give. Clues about each artist are found on the Answer and Clue sheet. Players must play the Get a Clue card //prior// to giving an answer.
 * Going Once! Cards**

1. Players auction each artwork they collected from the museum, one at a time. The player who began the game auctions first. 2. For each "Admirer" card, players should roll one die. For each "Buff" card, players should roll two dice. For each "Connoisseur" card, players should roll three dice. 3. Each roll equals a price "offer" for the artwork. For each pip on the die or dice, players earn $10,000. For example, if a 3 is rolled, the player earns $30,000. If a 10 is rolled, the player earns $100,000. 4. If the player is happy with the first value he rolls, he can keep that "offer" or choose to roll again. Players may roll a total of 3 times for each artwork. The value rolled on the 3rd roll is the "offer" the player must accept for the artwork. 3. Once all players have auctioned all of their cards, they total their offers. The player with the greatest amount is the winner.
 * Auction**

Motivational Issues
Going Once! engages the learner in the following ways:
 * Curiosity is aroused as a result of not knowing what artwork a player has landed on or what a player will draw from the Going Once! deck. According to Keller, this should gain the players' //attention//.
 * Players have control over where their pieces move, so a player with strong knowledge of a particuluar genre is able to keep his game token in that genre's room and try to land on the "Connoisseur" cards to earn more money during the auction.
 * Competition ensues as players try to collect as many art cards as possible, giving them more auction opportunities. Players may also compete to try and collect the most "Buff" and "Connoisseur" cards, as these will potentially allow players to earn more money during the auction.
 * Players are challenged to use their knowledge of a particular artist's style and themes to determine who created an artwork with which they are not familiar. This makes the game //relevant// (Keller) to what students will have learned in their art history class.
 * Players may experience what Csikszentmihalyi describes as "flow" in that the game should prove to be an intermediate challenge for them. Players should be familiar with most, if not all of the "Admirer" cards (giving //confidence// (Keller)), some of the "Buff" cards, and few of the "Connoisseur" cards.

Design Process
I went through an initial design process that led me straight back to the drawing board! My first game idea wasn't approved, with the main reason being that the context didn't make sense for the content. So, I went from a French vocabulary game in which the player would "climb" the Eiffel Tower, to a race game in which the student would use French vocabulary "in the Louvre" to be the first player to reach the Mona Lisa, to an art history game in which the player would "steal" artworks from a museum and sell them, to the final game, Going Once! I ended up rejecting the French vocabulary idea because I was having trouble coming up with how the players would use it to work their way through the museum, and wasn't sure if I could come up with something replayable enough since the context of the game would be the same each time (a museum). This seemed too limited, but I did like the museum idea, so I decided instead to work with art history content. To find out about similar games, I checked boardgamegeek.com and did a general search on Google. To get feedback and flesh out the game, I wrote up some intial game specs and went through them with my husband, who posed questions about potential problem areas. We spent about an hour talking through the game, and I revised my ideas from there. I then sent these revised ideas to Bernie, who asked some other questions and gave me feedback that I used to make a few other revisions (such as don't have the players be "thieves" as some might object to the theft context). When I got into the knitty gritty of actually designing the board, card decks, and rules, I was forced to make more decisions about how things would look and work, until I finally had a playable prototype. Once I had the prototype, I playtested it with my husband and some friends to gather feedback. As a result of playtesting, I made the following revisions:
 * Added a starting point in the middle of the board for players' tokens.
 * Added more doors to each room.
 * Added a "strength" to each art card, in the form of "Admirer" (weakest), "Buf" (next strongest), and "Connoisseur" (strongest). This was important in that players then began to compete to collect the "Connoisseur" cards since those had the potential to win them more money during the auction.
 * Removed cards from the Going Once! deck that penalized a player for giving a correct answer. For example, I originally had cards in there that said things like "Lose a turn" and "Give one of your art cards to the player to your right." Since the only time a player can draw a Going Once! card is after he's provided a correct answer, these cards essentially punished the player for giving a correct answer, and have now been removed.

I learned the following lessons that I'll cary to my next game design project:
 * Talk about the game with various people. Each person will see something different and give unique feedback.
 * Playtesting is extremely important. SO many issues are brought to light and resolved during playtesting.
 * Context and content go hand-in-hand. Make sure the context makes sense for the content.